In recent years, with an increase in the use of online content, smooth content transmission has become important. Accordingly, there is active discussion of adaptive streaming technology in which a bit rate of content is adaptively changed according to a usable transmission bandwidth or a change in an apparatus performance of a user.
There is a dynamic adaptive streaming over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) (DASH) which corresponds to a representative technology of adaptive streaming. The DASH is a technology related to a method of configuring content and a method of transmitting the configured content. Hereinafter, a broadcasting communication system using the DASH technology will be described with reference to FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a broadcasting communication system using the DASH technology according to the related art.
Referring to FIG. 1, the broadcasting communication system includes a server 100 and a client 120. The server 100 and the client 120 communicate with each other through a communication network 130. For example, the server 100 may provide a DASH content 110 to a user, and the DASH content 110 is configured as follows.
The DASH content 110 includes a media segment belonging to a representation 110a and an adaptation set 110b, and metadata 110c. The representation 110a indicates a row of media segments having different image qualities, different resolutions, different bit rates, etc., and the adaptive set 110b is obtained by grouping a plurality of representations. Here, the number of the representations 110a and the number of the adaptive sets 110b may be larger than one. The metadata 110c includes information on a relation between the representation 110a and the adaptive set 110b. 
The client 120 receives metadata 110c and determines which adaptive set should be reproduced. Further, the client 120 selects one of the plurality of representations in the determined adaptive set, based on the network situation and the capability of a reproduction device in the client 120. Next, the client 120 downloads the selected representations from the server 110 and reproduces the downloaded representations.
FIG. 2 illustrates an example where the DASH content is provided, in a broadcasting communication system according to the related art.
The DASH technology uses a client control streaming scheme in which streaming is controlled by the client, instead of a server control streaming scheme in which streaming is controlled by a server.
When the server control streaming scheme is used, a server 200 transmits optimal content according to each network situation for each client based on information on the client 210 connected thereto. However, as illustrated in FIG. 2, the server 200 is overloaded as the number of the clients increases.
Meanwhile, when the client control streaming scheme based on the DASH technology is used, the server 200 may generate a plurality of media segments and a plurality of pieces of metadata which can be used according to each network situation. Then, the client directly selects and reproduces content according to a current network situation, so as to download and reproduce optimal content according to the network situation without a load of the server 200.
However, since all of the clients use maximal amount of traffic according to their own network situations, there is a problem in that an amount of network traffic increases even when there are a small number of clients. Further, implementation of a DASH client logic of the client is in a region of the reproduction device, and there is no control method which a communication network can use in order to decrease the amount of the network traffic.
Further, the server 200 merely provides the content, and has a difficulty to configure content for a specific communication network (as an example, a communication network having a large amount of traffic). The reason is that a plurality of different communication networks may exist between the clients, so that it is unreasonable that the content is configured only for a specific communication network. Further, there is a problem in that reconfiguring of the content according to a network situation does not comport with the original purpose of the DASH technology.
The above information is presented as background information only to assist with an understanding of the present disclosure. No determination has been made, and no assertion is made, as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the present disclosure.